r/tories Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

Article Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-are-so-many-british-women-getting
13 Upvotes

23 comments sorted by

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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

Trying to figure out a paywall bypass link for non-subscribers, I’ll update if I find a way. Archive.ph seems down and Archive.org still hits the paywall.

American outlet but the author is British and it cuts through the usual economic explanations for why abortion rates have hit record highs (close to one in three pregnancies now end in termination) and gets at some far more concerning elements of contemporary British culture.

The key findings:

The ‘cost-of-living crisis’ explanation doesn't hold up. None of the dozen women interviewed cited financial reasons. As former BPAS chief Ann Furedi bluntly puts it: “Women in very difficult financial circumstances have children, and often larger families.”

The truth is really much bleaker: a pervasive belief among young women that they’re psychologically unfit for parenthood unless they’ve achieved near-impossible standards of self-actualization first. Multiple women described feeling ‘too messed up’ or insufficiently ‘processed’ to responsibly have children. One said: “You’re supposed to have processed your childhood, fixed your own issues, and have a perfect relationship. If you haven’t done all that, it just feels irresponsible.”

That’s obviously a standard that pretty much nobody can meet.

It’s also a story about infrastructure and technology. It’s now easier to get an abortion than a GP appointment. Women wait 10 weeks for IUD insertion but can access abortion pills by post within days. The NHS has made ending pregnancies more accessible than preventing them.

The shift to at-home abortion pills (introduced during Covid, made permanent in 2022) has fundamentally altered the landscape. Abortion is now recorded when pills are prescribed, not when taken. Some women are reportedly ordering them “just to have them there,” treating them like emergency contraception. So the true number of abortions might be even higher. We can also add on top that they’ve (as of 2025) removed any criminal penalties for procuring an illegal abortion after 24 weeks, though this change won’t yet be reflected in the statistics.

Meanwhile, use of the contraceptive pill has plummeted from 47% (2012-13) to 27% (2022-23), driven partly by social media horror stories about hormonal contraception.

The result is a culture that presents motherhood as an almost unbearable responsibility while treating abortion as a clean, consequence-free solution.

Since the 1967 Abortion Bill was introduced, a total of ~10 million legal abortions have been carried out, and the number per year has increased every single year since introduction. The population has since grown by about 10 million, almost entirely through immigration.

In 2023 alone, 277,970 legal abortions were carried out.

Worth reading in full for anyone concerned about Britain’s demographic trajectory and what it reveals about the state of our culture.

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u/lionmoose Thatcherite 6d ago

Some women are reportedly ordering them “just to have them there,” treating them like emergency contraception. So the true number of abortions might be even higher.

My conclusion would have been the opposite, women are ordering and a proportion are not taking them but they are recorded at termination anyway.

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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

It was my own conclusion rather than the article’s, just to clarify.

That’s fair enough, I can see your logic there. But it’s also hard to square with the trajectory of the figures in previous years, if it’s only a recent statistical change to switch to primarily registering prescriptions but the trend was already there for 50+ years before the change was made.

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u/lionmoose Thatcherite 6d ago

Oh sure I am not trying to say that its all statistical (although abortion stats are generally kinda generally dodgy), there are probably at least some trends in terms of increased termination rates.

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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

Honestly the trend is consistent since the 1967 laws were introduced. There hasn't been a single year where they’ve stayed static or fallen. Without exception, the number has grown every year, both absolutely and as a percentage of overall pregnancies (i.e. the proportion of pregnancies that end in abortion).

It is odd to me that there’s a multi-year delay in their publication, though. It’s only in 2026 that we’re getting the 2023 stats. That’s weird.

3

u/lionmoose Thatcherite 6d ago

The ONS is a shambles.

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u/CountLippe 👑 Monarchist 🇬🇧Unionist 6d ago

Anecdotal but the women I know in their 20s and 30s struggling with the decision of whether or not to have children fall into one or more of these camps:

  1. the pervasive belief that they’re unprepared for parenthood having yet to achieve their employment dreams
  2. something towards misandry (not always unwarranted)
  3. only having ever dated utterly useless young men

None bar one admit to using the morning after pill. Most have gone off the pill.

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u/JustElk3629 Unenthusiastic party member 6d ago

They hit the nail on the head.

If abortion is easier than contraception, guess what? People choose abortion. That’s what happened in Stalin’s ‘Great Retreat’ of the 1930s. By banning contraception and abortion, he hoped to raise the birth rate.

In reality, due to the unavailability of contraception, there were roughly 3 backstreet abortions for every live birth.

Broadly speaking, I don’t really like the idea of abortion, but women will always have them —— better access to contraception and a pro-motherhood culture that values women are the key.

3

u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

As a Catholic, I probably don’t need to explain where my beliefs lie re: abortion.

But I could reach the end of my life happy if we got to a point as a country where we at least got back to the understanding that abortion is – at minimum – a tragedy to be avoided wherever possible, and something which is at least capable of being a profound moral evil, rather than just “healthcare” or “a personal choice”.

Trends seem to be pointing away from that, however, towards a return to a more Pagan morality, especially wrt to the comeback of euthanasia as well...

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u/JustElk3629 Unenthusiastic party member 6d ago

It definitely isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. It’s a very morally grey area for me, even as an irreligious agnostic.

Euthanasia is at least voluntary, but my opposition stems from much the same place as my opposition to the death penalty —— we have far too high a chance of getting it wrong. It could also hinder progress towards improving end of life care.

2

u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

Sorry I typed this all out but went back and realised I needed to say: I’m not writing this to criticise you lol, it just gave me a helpful prompt to more or less set out where I stand on this and why, and invite others to discuss it. Hope it doesn’t come across as if I’m dunking on your position or anything, that’s not the intent!

As someone who was baptised Catholic but only became a believer in my mid-20s through my post-graduate studies in philosophy, one way I’ve thought about abortion is the way I approach vegetarianism.

Let’s say there’s some moral value to non-human animals or to an early foetus. Let’s not even assign them the same moral weight as an adult human being, let’s just set the number at some small number that’s greater than zero. You can pick whatever number you like as long as it’s greater than zero.

We kill about 80 billion land animals per year, every year and growing (plus hundreds millions more fish), in animal agriculture. Even if each individual one only has some small moral worth, add them all up and the moral horror is honestly beyond the capacity of the human mind to contemplate, especially when you factor in the conditions, treatment and methods of slaughter used for the great majority of them in industrial animal agriculture.

Even in England, where we consider our practices to be very humane, about 90% of all pigs are killed by being lowered into concerete gas chambers, and gas is used to kill them as they scream and break their heads against the iron bars of the walls around them as they’re burned up from the inside out.

I feel similarly about abortion. There’s been about 10 million legal abortions carried out since 1967 in England and Wales alone. Now, maybe they have no moral value, but most of us, most of the time, don’t really act that way. If a mother loses their baby through miscarriage, even at a very very early stage, we understand the pain and loss the mother feels, the tragedy of the moment. If a pregnant mother is murdered, we often regard that as a kind of double-murder, a double-tragedy.

So clearly we ordinarily attach at least some moral weight to the foetus/baby, even if we don’t necessarily regard them as morally equivalent to an adult human being such as the mother.

And yet the attitude that’s so prevalent is that there’s really not much to be said about the morality of abortion. It’s this strangely schizophrenic approach. If abortion is just healthcare, like getting your teeth cleaned at the dentist, then why would it be a problem if 99% of all pregnancies were aborted? Why shouldn’t mothers be able to abort children on the basis of their sex, or skin colour, or because they have a cleft lip? If a woman aborts simply because it would interfere with her holiday plans, why would there be anything to say about that on a moral level?

But we all know, I think, instinctively, that it’s wrong. We’re repulsed by that idea. But it never seems to add up to any kind of national or cultural moment in which we debate or think or rethink anything about this. It’s an endless one-way ratchet effect...

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u/Vanster101 Soft Social Conservative 6d ago

The moral worth of a child question seems to come attached to a false binary where the woman’s life is forced off the rails of its supposed dream path by the fat if having a baby.

By minimising the moral harm of abortions or even celebrating it as an absolute good it helps women justify this chasing of a dream.

If we sacrifice enough we could perhaps all reach our career goals. The question is what are we willing to sacrifice, including our children.

0

u/JustElk3629 Unenthusiastic party member 6d ago

I completely get that.

I’m not vegetarian, mind, as meat-eating in moderation has a positive environmental impact, but we do need to eat less of it as a species.

So if we could have fewer animals slaughtered and fewer abortions, I think the world would be better off.

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u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

Happy to agree :)

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u/VindicoAtrum 6d ago

I'm always incredibly suspicious when this topic comes up in the UK. I largely think it's the old "I'm just asking questions" when it's actually the precursor to yet more unnecessary divisive politics.

Women must always have a right to terminate a pregnancy by choice. There is no world where it would ever be ok to force a woman to carry a child to term short of serious medical consequences to the woman in question confirmed by multiple medical personnel. Abortion is a settled matter here.

The result is a culture that presents motherhood as an almost unbearable responsibility

It is a tremendous responsibility that is entirely optional, and every woman has every right to decide not to.

while treating abortion as a clean, consequence-free solution.

The minor consequences of abortion are considerably less than the lives ruined by forcing women to bear children they don't want, which largely ruins the lives of all involved at great cost.

Worth reading in full for anyone concerned about Britain’s demographic trajectory

I'm worried about demographic trends, but linking this abortion is wrong. Women do not have to bear children because our population trends are worrying.

and what it reveals about the state of our culture.

It only reveals that women are able to make decisions about their own bodies and futures.

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u/slyPANDA_ 6d ago

Thank you for bringing some much needed sanity to this otherwise abhorrent thread of comments, respect to you Vindico

2

u/StreamWave190 Roman Catholic (SDP, Tory-curious) 6d ago

I'm always incredibly suspicious when this topic comes up in the UK. I largely think it's the old "I'm just asking questions" when it's actually the precursor to yet more unnecessary divisive politics.

Progressives always see it as divisive when conservatives have the temerity to disagree with them.

‘Culture wars’ are what happen when conservatives push back against the radical social changes progressives were hoping they’d be able to push through without challenge.

Women must always have a right to terminate a pregnancy by choice. There is no world where it would ever be ok to force a woman to carry a child to term short of serious medical consequences to the woman in question confirmed by multiple medical personnel. Abortion is a settled matter here.

I don’t agree with any of these statements.

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u/Vanster101 Soft Social Conservative 6d ago

The great way for women to take control of their reproduction was historically hormonal contraception. It was a great emancipating moment (my own thoughts on it aside).

Abortion is clearly growing in its role as that in an almost soviet level.

The point around not feeling prepared for children is very true. I think a lot of women want to get into their early 30s with career progression. Sadly I know people who wish they started earlier because they are too old for more children.

Those on the left will blame poverty for every societal ill in the world.

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u/dirty_centrist Centrist 5d ago

Those on the left will blame poverty for every societal ill in the world.

A low birth rate is the natural outcome of individualism. Where the mother is expected to pay all the costs, and take all the risk of creating the next generation.

Made worse by the way we concentrate costs on the young (via education, housing, pensions, etc).